The three ways Jesus read the Bible that Evangelicals are told not to do are these:

1. Jesus didn't stick to what "the Bible says," but read it with a creative flare that had little if any connection to what the biblical writer actually meant to say. 2. Jesus felt he could "pick and choose" what parts of the Old Testament were valid and which weren't. 3. Jesus read his Bible as a Jew, not an evangelical (or even a Christian).

Other evangelicals would do well to listen to Enns. He's getting some things right. The Jesus that we find in the Gospels is doing exactly what Enns says. The significant problem unaddressed by Enns is what he says at the end of this essay in the Huffington Post:

If evangelicals (and I am among them) pay attention to Jesus, they will learn a vital lesson: Our own Bible shows us that getting the Bible right isn't the center of the Christian faith. Getting Jesus right is. LINK.

But seriously, if we read the New Testament the way Jesus did with the Old Testament then how is it possible to get Jesus right? I find that evangelicals have been forced to reinterpret their Bible in light of secular critics and the realities of their faith which have caused, and is causing, a great deal of harm. But they still don't get it. The problem is faith itself. Faith has no method. Now with Enns leading the charge, Christians have no method for understand their own scriptures. There are different religious understandings of Jesus as can be found here. But even more importantly there are different views of Jesus from within Christian scholarship itself as seen here.

Perhaps Enns should learn from another biblical scholar, Robert Price, who writes about what it takes to be a critical modern historian as opposed to a precritical gullible one. Of critical historians, he says:

These scholars make their ancient documents sing for their supper. They think of them not as "authorities" to be heeded but rather as "sources" to be scrutinized and evaluated. The maxim of precritical historians is "Innocent until proven guilty," while that of critical historians is "Guilty until proven innocent." The critical historian recognizes that writers of the past, whether letter writers, chroniclers, essayists, whatever, indulged in deception, spin, propaganda, legend mongering, pseudonymity, and other non-veridical conventions." [Page 21 in his excellent take-down of Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard's book, Killing Jesus, Killing History: Jesus in the No-Spin Zone.]

It's really quite surprising to me that Enns is smart enough to be a critical historian/theologian (an oxymoron?) in some areas, but ends up being a precrticial gullible historian/theologian who doesn't have the smarts to be aware of this fact.

So my question to Enns is what hermeneutics should be used when trying to understand who Jesus really is, if he himself set the standard for interpreting your Scriptures? If anyone attempted to exegete your scriptures the way Jesus did, he or she would be maligned for it. If another cult leader did what Jesus did we would not follow him. In fact, the Jews in the days of Jesus knew their Old Testament, which was one of the major reasons they rejected Jesus. Because he did not! There are plenty of modern examples of cult leaders reading the New Testament the way Jesus read the Old Testament. You don't accept their interpretations. Why should we accept Jesus's or yours?